Cruising my 1995 Catalina 42 MK II sailboat with my cat XO, the good, the bad, and the ugly of the open ocean world cruising life.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

When the easy is hard

It was time to download new maps for my Garmin chart plotter. I learned early in my offshore cruising to postpone buying maps until I needed them. I found that there would be a new version by the time I got into the coverage area.

This should not have been a problem. And in a more connected location it would not have been. First, I had to find someone with a USB to SD card reader. One of my former crew had taken mine with him when he left. "Not a problem", he said. "Buy a new one and send me the bill." After an $80 cab ride I discovered that there were none to be found. Next step, find a cruiser to borrow one. Mission accomplished. Now do the download - 2.5 gb. Use the marina WiFi. No dice. It kept dropping. Unfortunately Garmin (who otherwise I think highly of) does not packetize their downloads. You need to get it all in one shot. Next step. Pay $33 to the alternate provider for 3 gb of downloads. After 3 or 4 tries and about 5 hours I finally got the maps. Then it blew up one more time downloading software updates for my gear. Since I had about 3 copies of the updates I was not concerned that I did not get them. But would the charts work? Did I need to start another 2 hour download? Fortunately no, the charts had downloaded intact. One more item off the checklist.